Monday, September 03, 2007

A contest!

Here it is - the first contest here at 28 Cooks. Being a food blogger, I'm a huge fan of cookbooks. Although I haven't followed a recipe in years, I love to read about food and cookbooks provide perfect inspiration for me to create my own recipes. I used to have well over 200 cookbooks, but due to space constraints, I had to seriously weed out my collection. I still enjoy adding to my collection, but I am a little more selective in my choosings.

One of the great perks about owning a food blog is that often I will receive things in the mail that companies want me to try and review. I am very upfront in letting them know that while I don't mind receiving them, I will be very honest about my feelings about them.

One of the things I love the most is getting cookbooks. Over the past few months, I've received 2 very excellent books. The first is called Street Food, which is exactly the type of cookbook I would write if given the opportunity. It's part travelogue, part recipes, and beautiful pictures. It's full of great street food from all over the world, and the recipes are easy enough for the home chef to follow.

The second book I just recently received is Morimoto's new cookbook, Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking.I was completely floored by this one. Although the recipes are definitely more for the gourmet chef, the history and pictures are absolutely beautiful. And here's the best part - I have 2 copies so I am offering one of them to one very lucky reader. All you have to do is leave me a comment telling me what your favorite food book or cookbook is before Midnight (Eastern Standard Time) on September 9th in order to be put into the drawing. On the 10th, I'll randomly pick a comment and the book is yours. If you do not win, however, I highly recommend at least looking through the book. The pictures are absolutely incredible, and if you love Japanese food, you'll love this book. Note - anyone is eligible, regardless of location, provided you can receive a package by post.

Now go ahead, leave me a comment and put yourself in the running for this fantastic book!

55 comments:

I don't know if I'm eligible as I live all the way in the Caribbean - Barbados to be exact. That aside, I love exploring different culutres and different cuisines. We have on Japanese restaurant here in Barbados but not yet been as I want to educate myself a little on the food so that I can at least appreciate the food when I vist.

Either way, I have plans on checking out the book and now with your recommendation, I'm more convinced.

One of my favorite cookbooks is Chef Paul Prudhomme's: Fiery Foods That I Love. I am not really a fan of his other ones but this one is just crazy. He was really ahead of his time in my opinion and had such a unique flavor palate that really set him apart. There are dozens of great gems in that book to draw inspiration from. I highly recommend it. Unfortunately my copy has degraded to having no cover and and is missing about 100 pages thanks to my lovely 2 year old.

Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet and Mangoes and Curry Leaves, both by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, are two of my very favorite cookbooks. The books are absolutely beautiful and have wonderful photography and travel writing. But, more importantly, they are excellent cookbooks.

Among the things I appreciate about them are the excellent "indexes" at the beginning, with various different categorizations of the recipes and meal suggestions (things for a dinner party, things for a cold day, etc.). That, and the food I've made from these books has been consistently awesome.

Both are expensive -- both were Christmas presents -- but well worth it.

I may be an odd duck. As a photographer I love to peruse a well done food/recipe book, and I may even tear-up over an especially well done item... but... my favorite actual cook book is More with less by Doris Janzen Longacre. No pictures, just recipes from all over the world on a budget more realistic for our times. I also like that it keeps my aware of the way that most of the world lives and eats.

I love "The Soup Bible" and the Moosewood Cookbook. Each has incredible variety on a theme: soups and vegetarian meals. Moosewood has incredible charm because it's hand-lettered, and each recipe is so simple. It's perfect for exciting food that I know I'll have stuff for in my pantry.

i will have to say Madhur Jaffery's "Taste of India"; every recipe that I have tried from there has become a family favourite. She has a wonderful anecdotal writing style that is very engaging...have spent many evenings just reading it and looking at the pictures.

The most well-worn and loved cook-book on my shelf is my grandmother's / mother's / now-daughter's (mine) add-to-it cook-book. My grandmother's recipes talk of types of wood to burn in the 'kooka' stove to get the right flare and length of temperature (so one could go work the farm and be sure the stove will keep burning). My mum's recipes reflect the introduction of packaged produced - (man did she love it when tomato purée began coming in jars and don't even mention riso-reeso in my presence...). My recipes include, eh, laser-printed copies of 28 Cooks recipes, ones I've developed, ones I've sourced on the net when all I had was beetroot and lentils, plus a haunch of road-kill kangaroo (I'm not kidding, it was delicious). Sigh. I love this cookbook. I would grab it, along with photos, if my house was burning.

Thanks for letting me tell you that. I live in Australia so you probably won't want to post anything to me, but it was nice to write about my heirloom cookbook.

At the moment, I'm totally entranced with Claudia Roden's Arabesque! I love her writing, and the fact that she includes a lot of cultural information in her book. I feel this gives more substance and a certain kind of warmth to the recipes, and brings them closer to the reader. It really is a fascinating read.

I'm still searching for a favorite cookbook, but I do read a lot of books about food and my favorites so far are the ones by Ruth Reichl: Garlic & Sapphires, Tender at the Bone, and Comfort Me with Apples. All are quite delicious. :)

I love cookbooks! My favorite for now is one I got from the Red Hat Society, it has so many different recipes from all over, things I had never made before, but have tried many.My grand daughter is Japanese American, and she is 12 years old and loves to cook, so I am hoping to win the Morimoto cookbook so we can try some of the recipes in this wonderful book. We love watching him on Iron Chef America.

I'm the same way. I just bought two more this past weekend, bringing my collection to 91 books plus 2 1/2 binders of collected recipes. I want to learn how to cook Japanese food, and the book sounds like a nice addition. I also love watching him on Iron Chef America.

This is going to sound odd, because I really don't bake that often, but How To Bake by Nick Malgieri is one of my favorites. Also, I know it's not all that exciting, but Joy of Cooking has never let me down. I'm also a huge fan of Memories of a Lost Egypt by Colette Rossant -- it's a beautiful story of her childhood in Egypt, focuses on the food of her home and family, and features some wonderful recipes.

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Street Food -- I might just have to pick that up!

Definitely, Sunday Supper at Lucques by Suzanne Goin. Daunting, complicated recipes, but wonderful tastes/tectures. Using/reading this book has helped me expand my own cooking and made me a much better cook.

I have several hundred cookbooks-nearly all vegetarian too-and its hard to pick out just one as a favorite. I Read them like regular books and especially love the ones that are like diaries or travelogues.

One I am finding particulary interesting is not a cook book but more an information book. Its called the Herb and Spice Companion. by Marcus Webb. Its a UK book and many of the items listed I had never seen or heard of. I am trying to replant an herb garden and wanted to educate myself a little more on what I am growing.

NOw if you want a real cookbook---anything to do with breads-artisan style-is up my alley!

I love this blog and recommend or send it almost daily to my email friends.

Greens are such an amazing and diverse subset of vegetables and they are underused in this country! Most don't know how to go beyond spinach and broccoli. Some dare venture to Bok Choy land, but Dandelion Greens? Kale? Chard? Bring it on!

The Un-Cheese cookbook. I recently discovered the horrors of being lactose intolerant, and miss cheese with most fibers of my being, so finder recipes that mimic the taste without the...un-tasty side effects is heaven.

My favorite is a Weight Watchers cookbook, "Around the World" or something like that. Because its WW its healthy and low-fat, but the recipes are delicious and I love trying recipes from various countries.

This is a book passed down from generation after generation. It is in my native language Tamil and not available everywhere. It was put together by a group of women (the ladies club of tuticorin, a city in Tamil Nadu, India). It has everything typical to the Nadar (a community)cooking. And the best part is, it starts really simple with basics for the cooking newbie to the most advanced person. It is meant as a gift to the newly-wed bride. Most mothers get it for their daughters and most new brides survive solely using the book. I love it for its simplicity and the traditional recipes mom makes..And ofcourse it has tips for the new bride, everything from how to deal with MIL's to how to iron shirts ;)and yeah it has no name.. just called tuticorin cook book!

Ok my favorite cookbook is the Top secret recipes (all of them) because I am a foods teacher I need to find recipes that the kids will enjoy and they can relate to these recipes for they are their favorites (KWIM) I am going to have to check out that street foods cookbook might definitely be something that I can use in class. PS love this blog.

at this moment my favorite cookbook is Clotilde's chocolate & zucchini. I'm trying to make as many of her recipes as possible. I also like to use The Healthy Kitchen by Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley. I make a variation of his applesauce muffins weekly.Renee

My fave cookbook at the moment is 'Cooking the Best' which is the book companion to the British television series. The series is in reruns and I catch every single episode even though I have seen them several times. The show and cookbook feature 3 chefs; Sylvana Franco, Ben O'Donoghue and Paul Merrett. They each take a theme ingredient and showcase a recipe on that theme. I love Sylvana's recipes because they feature few ingredients and are easy and quick to make. Paul's are more elaborate and Ben's fall somewhere in between. I couldn't find the book here in the US but was able to locate it on AmazonUK.

All these posts have given me some great ideas and now I have a fresh cook book wish list.

We use many different cookbooks, for variety. One that we tend to use a lot would be: Moosewood Cookbook (Molly Katzen).Another is: Culina Mundi:World Cooking...with a more modern flare to it. And an old favorite would be Fannie Farmer...(pies!)For whole food see: Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallonand The Organic Cook's Bible by Jeff Cox

I love reading cookbooks! My favorite so far has to be Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, because I think he is hysterical! The whole thing just cracks me up. However, the book I use most often is How to cook everything by Mark Bittman. I found the best banana bread recipe in there, and have been devoted ever since.

I'm currently obsessed with Claudia Rodin's "Arabesque." I'd never even thought about Middle Eastern food until a trip to Armenia saw me try some Syrian delights that have since created a storm in my kitchen! Yuummmmm.

My favorite book/cookbook is Culinaria Hungary by Aniko Gergely. The pictures are absolutely gorgeous, the narrative about agricultural and culinary life in Hungary is wonderfully written, and the recipes are authentic (according to my Hungarian friends). Leafing through this book makes me feel like I'm actually in Hungary!

I'll go a different way - everyone seems to be listing cookbooks - My favorite foodbook is a recent one, published in May - Mediterranean Summer: A Season on France's Cote d'Azur and Italy's Costa Bella - it's all about Chef & producer David Shalleck's experience as a chef on a private yacht for the ultra-wealthy. He includes all the recipes for the dishes he mentions throughout the book in the back!PS - hope it's ok, but I've added you to my blogroll. Please let me know if it's not..thanks!

How generous of you to offer the cookbook. I don't own many cookbooks, but I recently received Dorie Greenspan's Baking, From My Home to Yours, from my mom, and it's sensational. So, she takes the top honor for me, or the cake, to be more precise. ;)

My current favorite is Giada DeLaurentiis' Everyday Italian...but my favorite cookbook, I don't even have a name for! It's very old, the pages are falling out, and here and there it has a comment in elegant script...my great great aunt's handwriting!

Hmmm...I just LOVE cookbooks, so this is really, really hard. I would have to say that I love the Chinaberry cookbook called Eat, Drink and Be Chinaberry. I've never made anything from it that I didn't like, and I've lent it to friends that (seriously) can't boil water and they make a great meal!!

Oh, this is SO hard!I have so many that I use all the time, but the one I own that I am currently most intrigued by is "Veggie Chic" by Rose Elliott. I am actually a carnivore and only stumbled upon this because I have several vegetarian friends that I regularly entertain and needed a good book of recipes. Most vegetarian cookbooks are full of nice recipes, but these are GREAT recipes, full of flavor and creativity. I randomly cook out of this even when it's just my husband and I now. I am sure you have it (with a collection like that!) but if not, I strongly suggest you check it out. There are some very gourmet ingredients, but most are readily available.